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He has a different problem now.............. he gets a BSOD and Windows won't boot.

At the very lest he will have to reinstall kernel32.dll to get around that

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

The recovery disk will wipe out your data and put the system back to factory default....someone that knows what they are doing may be able to repair the OS and the kernel32 file required to boot....or at least be able to pull the data off before reinstalling.

MLF

How people treat you is their karma- how you react is yours-Wayne Dyer

Frankly I'm a little confused as to why the tech from Microsoft renamed the kernal, to each there own I suppose, as long as Antivirus 2k8 was removed correctly by the tech there should not be any issues, you would be fine to rename it back to its origional glory. As far as another option you have just copy the kernal from another computer (preferably with the same OS) and place it in the correct directory and reboot. You may run into a few things not working.

I've done this numerous times (One would figure that once would be enough) a while ago when I decided in my infinitely immature younger years to try and edit the kernal.. In case you are wondering this is a bad idea and 100% of the time causes the error you are experiencing.

The recovery disk will wipe out your data and put the system back to factory default.

OK, I haven't worked on an HP laptop with Vista, but I understand that they are like XP and have a hidden recovery partition. They do not ship with a recovery disk, but prompt you to make one (DVD) or several (CD).

So you should be able to restore the missing .dll or at least go back to a working restore point prior to the infection.

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

What is Kernel Patching?"Kernel patching" or "kernel hooking" is the practice of using unsupported mechanisms to modify or replace kernel code. Patching fundamentally violates the integrity of the Windows kernel and is undocumented, unsupported and has always been discouraged by Microsoft. Kernel patching can result in unpredictable behavior, system instability and performance problems—like the Blue Screen of Death–which can lead to lost user productivity and data. More importantly, kernel patching has increasingly become a mechanism used by malware developers to attack Windows systems. Motivations for patching the kernel vary widely. Anti-malware vendors, for example, may intercept system calls to prevent applications they have deemed malicious from creating processes on the system. The goals of these types of software are obviously laudable but these practices also may cause reliability and performance problems. The greatest risk from kernel patching comes from virus and spyware writers that use this technique with malicious intent and to hide their presence. Malware authors are motivated to patch the kernel because it is a powerful mechanism for attacking the user's PC and data. Patching can be used to implement rootkits, which also hide the presence of other malware on the system. This form of malware can be extremely potent—for example, allowing the capture of banking passwords and monitoring of all user activities.

Remember the Microsoft update of last month and the problems with Zone Alarm products?

Just like moxquito said
Incidentally,

Frankly I'm a little confused as to why the tech from Microsoft renamed the kernal

I Would guess that he thought that it was infected? but I don't think that this was a Microsoft tech. given that MS do not support OEM installations of their software, and this is an HP laptop?

My gut feel is that he simply left out the step of replacing the renamed version with a new one?

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Actually its quite simple, if you boot to DoS or another OS that prevents Windows from loading just edit the Kernel in any text editing program you get a bunch of HEX and ASCII characters, what I was doing was more or less just deleting and or replacing random characters, in no particular order. However this was back when I just got started dealing with computers and had no idea what exactly the Kernal was, I thought it had a cool name and wanted to see if I could make changes too it. I did not put alot of thought into it (obviously), I was young and just wanted to see what would happen.